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Microsoft Kinects with Audience…Finally

Original post date 11/29/11

With the Christmas shopping season fully upon us, Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing game device is expected to be at the top of the gift list for many consumers. Last year, Microsoft sold 1 million Kinect devices for its Xbox 360 in 10 days, and in a recent poll it was at the top of the wish list for children 13 and older. But what you might not expect is that some of those orders are going to be coming from businesses.

Early this month, Microsoft launched Kinect for Windows SDK with a brilliant, new ad called “Kinect Effect.

Microsoft is pushing Kinect hardware for Windows SDK for business applications. As staff writer Jason Kennedy from PCWorld states: “SDK will make it possible for programmers and dreamers from the world over to tinker with the system and make it do things Microsoft hadn’t thought of, and push the development of NUI [natural user interfaces] to the next level.”

What is noteworthy about the Kinect Effect ad is what it took for Microsoft to make it. Six years ago, in an interview with CMO magazine, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confessed to a problem long known by many consumers of Microsoft products:

During Microsoft’s climb to the top of the software industry, rapid-fire product cycles often happened without much front-end input from the folks in marketing. Engineers would develop new software, pack it with bells and whistles, decide on an acceptable number of bugs and toss it over to marketing for a press release and a launch event.”

At the time, Microsoft had set out to change that course through an expansive and expensive relationship marketing initiative. Internally, it aligned marketing with product groups, created a “mea culpa” marketing campaign to reach out to past customers, and targeted loyalists hoping to turn them into advocates.

But because of its past transgressions, and a perception that many of its products were “necessaries” with little to pique the desire of consumers, Microsoft struggled with finding an ignition point, or something to connect customers with the brand and ignite their passions.

Well, those days appear to be over. With the Kinect Effect, the tech titan proves that it can be relevant, even desirable, with a campaign that is expansive, inspiring and incredibly human. The campaign asks audiences to dream about how they might use Kinect by inspiring them with images of people playing air instruments, a doctor flipping through X-rays, and a student deconstructing DNA with only hand motions.

The expansiveness of the idea allows Microsoft to reach, and hopefully inspire, all three of its targeted audiences, including consumers/users, businesses and developers. Any one group can have the dream, but all three are needed for it to become reality.

Perhaps the most significant point of the ad is that it’s proof that the relationship marketing effort was a success, Microsoft now understands the strategic importance of the “front end” as Ballmer calls it. Five years ago the message of the commercial would of been about the “bells and whistles” of the Kinect device. This ad is an elegant and visually stimulating vision of what Kinect can enable, the virtually unlimited imagination of dreamers.

If Microsoft can continue to build this connection with the customer while retail store openings roll-out into 2012, it could transition itself from the company that makes the “have to have” product to the company that is the “want to have” brand.

Published by

scott.gillum

Scott is the Founder of Carbon Design Co and the former head of the Washington, DC office of gyro, the largest B2B agency in the world. Prior to joining gyro, he spent a dozen years at a professional services firm that specializes in B2B sales and marketing. Scott also writes a monthly column for Media Post and has contributed to three books on B2B Sales and Marketing. Follow him on Twitter @sgillum
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